ADRIFT Forum

A forum where new and old games can be reviewed - an alternative to the reviews on the Adventures page of the main ADRIFT site. Also the place to ask for any assistance if you are stuck playing a particular game.

If I had to sum up this game in a single sentence, I'd probably go with "five minutes of pointlessness". It's of a type I've played before: a game that starts badly, goes nowhere and ends without anything of import happening. The good and bad endings are pretty much the same, so player input is largely irrelevant.

I found the terse responses to what I considered perfectly reasonable commands particularly annoying. If the author's intention was to annoy players, he succeeded admirably. In fact, after several remarkably unhelpful responses I considered quitting and if not for the fact that I finished the game before I knew it, I probably would have done. The "five minutes of pointlessness" comment I made was perfectly serious; even by the standards of short games, this one was so short that it was over almost before I'd begun playing it. The three scenes are each tiny, with no real leeway given for the player to explore or try other things; you can do what you have to do and nothing else, and what you have to do is nothing very special. There's also no explanation given for what any of the scenes have to do with each other. Why am I working on a checkout in scene one but in a command center in scene three about to press a button that launches missiles?

If you want an example of a game that does an excellent job of being both incredibly short and incredibly frustrating, play this one. Otherwise, avoid it like the plague.

##################################

In progress: Shadows of the Mind 72k and counting. ETA: sometime in 2018.